When Night is Falling

When Night is Falling is about Camille. Camille works at a Christian college and has a boring fiancé. Her very boring life gets interrupted when a carnival comes to town. With this Carnival comes Petra, a seductive lesbian who Camille falls for. Camille must then choose between her straight-laced church life or the exciting, liberal carnies who live on the fringes of society.

I’ve seen a lot of WLW movies where the main character starts out as a straight with a boring life. Usually, said characters agonizes over leaving that boring, heteronormative life to live their queer truth until about halfway through the third act. That is not what happens in When Night is Falling. Camille seems to realize her current, heterosexual life is super boring so she goes all-in with the sexy carnival lady pretty damn fast. I’m glad they did that as opposed to have Camille angst about leaving her old life behind. That would not have been relatable to me as a viewer because Camille’s life is so damn uninteresting.

Petra, Camille’s love interest is fantastic. No wonder Camille doesn’t waste any time. Petra flirts with Camille by going to Camille’s place of work (which is a Christian college) and fires an arrow through Camille’s open window containing some soft-core lesbian photos and her phone number. Incredible! Beyond this initial flirtation, Petra is brilliant because she refuses to get sucked into romance movie tropes like climbing out a window to avoid detection. She’s also a open and upfront with her affections and intentions. Petra’s really the one who powers the relationship forward in a way that leads it to being well paced.

While I really like the pacing of the romance and the subversion of cliches in the first two acts, the third act is where I find problems with the movie. The first problem being the inevitable third act fight that Camille and Petra get into after two acts of queer bliss. This fight is not over something like their very different lifestyles, Camille’s internalized shame or her continued employment at a homophobic Christian college. Instead, it’s because Petra dances provocatively at a party and Camille gets upset and then they both say hurtful things. After every potential relationship hurdle they effortlessly sailed through, a fight about this seemed very out of proportion.

I also want to give a brief shoutout to Henry Czerny who played Camille’s fiance. His character is boring and awful. But as an actor, Czerny is really giving it his all. He actually sort of steals the show for me. Czerny does particularly well in the last scene he shares with Camille where he calls her selfish for ruining their heterosexual facade. He has this Michael Shannon-esque intensity to him that made me worry that this movie was gonna go ahead and bury its gays. Czerny was so effectively terrifying I was worried it might end with him killing Camille. He doesn’t. It’s just that Czerny injected a fully unnecessary but much-appreciated amount of tension into this scene.

After this fight, Camille has a near-death experience which reunites the couple. I find that an overdone way to get two characters back together. Two characters reaffirming their love for each other while one of them is in a hospital bed is a trope I’ve seen far too often on my time on this earth. There are times when this trope can work but when it doesn’t, such as in When Night Is Falling, to me it just seems like a lazy way to reunite characters and fix a relationship without actually working for it.

When Night is Falling is not a perfect film but it has a unique sort of charm. I enjoyed the lack of romantic obstacles our couple faced in the first two acts. There is also something to be said for taking the common heterosexual romance trope of the near-death experience reunion and allowing The Gays a crack at it too. The actresses have good chemistry and are rounded out by a strong, supporting cast. My main critique of When Night is Falling is one that is maybe spawned out of envy. I just feel like Camille might be too bland to deserve her super cool, devoted circus girlfriend.

Overall rating: 6.0/10

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